Demystifying Screendance – An Introduction to Screendance

10:00 – 17:00, Saturday 10 and 10:00 – 16:00 Sunday 11 November 2018
One Touch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness
£50
Booking here

(Image © ‘and that is what you see us by (2018) Barua, Ellis, McPherson’ )

This two-day workshop with Natalia Barua is for complete newcomers who are inquisitive about video dance, as well as video artists, choreographers and dancers who would like to investigate the medium.

The workshop will give participants an introduction to Screendance with a focus on demystifying the art form, understanding its historic and current context and working practically on approaches to its creation.

Working with improvisation, we will work together to explore movement with and without the camera, gaining confidence experimenting with the ‘somatic camera’. We will work with tasks that provoke understanding and visual awareness of movement, textures and landscapes around us, and develop our confidence in constructing images.

Drawing from her experience, Natalia will encourage collaboration, discussion and the exercising of equality between video & dance and how the synthesis of these disciplines creates a unique language. Natalia is interested in genuine relationships to locations in her screendance practice and we will (weather permitting!) work outdoors and indoors exploring the range of possibilities for making work.

Participants should bring along a camera, if they have one, to work with.

About Natalia Barua

Natalia Barua is a dance artist working predominantly in screendance, interdisciplinary performance and inclusive practice. She is recently based in Edinburgh after eight years of working and living in London and Barcelona. 

Her screendance works have been awarded at and selected for several international screendance festivals and presented in venues worldwide. In 2016, she was invited to work with award-winning Scottish screendance artist and scholar Katrina McPherson for the creation of we record ourselves, a single and multi-screen work which premiered at Threshold Arts Space in Perth and won the Bath Spa University MediaWall Competition. 

Natalia began her career making live performance works for gallery spaces in collaboration with various audiovisual artists. Her interest in site-specific, non-theatre based dance as well as collaboration led her to screendance, and she has since sought training throughout Europe and was awarded the Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship in 2016 to support her development and networks within the field. Natalia’s work has recently returned to live performance, and she is interested in expanding screendance into cross art form contexts. Her new screendance performance installation ISLA was presented at Edinburgh’s Hidden Door Festival in May 2018. 

Natalia has worked as a practitioner for nearly ten years, working in community and professional contexts and she has particular experience working with people with learning disabilities and groups with specialist needs. Natalia has been employed throughout the UK as a teacher, facilitator and mentor.